04/14/2026
Fate is Copout:
I hate ambiguity
Call it a trauma response. I do. And yes, I know it's sometimes unavoidable. Still…
When you've spent enough of your life bracing for impact because the people around you were unpredictable, inconsistent, or volatile, you learn to crave clarity the way a drowning person craves air.
Ambiguity isn't poetic to me. It's too often a preventable precursor to harm.
Which means I have a deep, unshakable hatred for words like fate.
Fate has always struck me as a convenient fiction, a pretty ribbon tied around chaos, to make it feel meaningful. “It must have been fate" "Everything happens for a reason." "What will be will be." “boys will be boys” These phrases don't comfort me. They infuriate me. Because they're not wisdom. They're resignation and a lack of accountability dressed up as spirituality.
Fate Is Not a Cosmic Plan. It's a convenient excuse.
Here's what I actually believe:
Fate is not some magical plan written in the stars by the universe. Fate is the predictable outcome of an unexamined life.
Think about it. When you never stop to ask why you react the way you do, why you explode at criticism, why you shut down during conflict, why you always date the same unavailable person, why you sabotage your own success—your future becomes frighteningly easy to predict.
It's why people throughout time and all love our ancient literature, have been able to “read the fates.” Not because they were psychic, or possessed supernatural abilities, but because most people are ignorant to the very predictable ways they move through the world.
Reading fate isn't predicting the future. It's predicting people. It’s as simple as assuming most people will always react to most things exactly the way they always have.
You will do tomorrow what you did yesterday. You will react the same way you always have. You will make the same choices, fall into the same traps, and call it “Just who I am.” "just the way things are"
That's not destiny. That's being lazy. That's a behavioral loop. It's a copout. And people call it fate because that’s far easier than learning to understand, predict and choose your own reactions. It's much easier to believe that life happens “to you” rather than you having to respond thoughtfully to life.
The Free Will Problem
So then, what about free will? Surely that's the antidote?
I don't love that term either. "Free will" has been debated by philosophers for millennia, and most of what passes for free will in everyday conversation is just impulse dressed up as choice.
You didn't freely choose to scroll your phone for an hour—you were bored and your hand moved. You didn't freely choose to snap at your partner—you were tired and triggered. That's not freedom. That's a biological reflex.
True free will—the kind worth wanting- the kind that overcomes “fate” isn't automatic. It's earned.
And here's the heart of the argument: Mindfulness is the skill that develops freewill.
Creating Recognition in Reaction
Here's what mindfulness actually does, stripped of the crystals and the calming playlists and the influencer aesthetic.
Mindfulness allows you to have space to observe and eventually choose in moments of reaction.
That's it. That's the whole mechanism. And that space changes everything.
Without mindfulness, the sequence “aka fate” looks like this:
Stimulus → Immediate predictable biological reaction → Outcome
Something happens, and before you've even registered that something has happened, your nervous system has already fired off a response. Someone criticizes your work, and your face is hot and your mouth is open before you can think. Your partner forgets something important, and you're already crying or yelling or shutting down. The past hijacks the present.
With mindfulness, the sequence gains a breath of room:
Stimulus → Biological Reaction → Recognition of reaction → Conscious choice → Outcome
Mindfulness is what lets you recognize the deterministic reality of the moment—yes, that thing happened; yes, your body is reacting; yes, this pattern is familiar—and then, from that recognition, we can exercise something that looks an awful lot like free will.
The Decoupling
Mindfulness, at its core, is the practice of separating your thoughts and emotions from your concept of self or at least from one's reactions. Not denying them. Not suppressing them. Just noticing that they are things happening to you, not who you are and they don't have to determine your behavior.
You are not your anger. You are the one noticing the anger. You are not your fear. You are the one aware of the fear. You are not your urge to lash out or shut down or run away. You are the thing witnessing those things.
And that witness—that recognition of our reactions—is where freedom lives.
When you can see a thought as just a thought, and an emotion as just an emotion, you uncouple the trigger from the outcome of an event. It’s no longer predetermined. The script breaks. The automatic sequence stops running. Because now, in that space you've created, you can recognize options for response, rather than predetermined reactions.
You can ask: do I wanna make the same choice as before?
That question is free will. It’s not magical. It’s not glorious. Just the humble, hard-won ability to choose differently than you would have chosen before.
Without Mindfulness, Free Will Is a Fantasy
This is the uncomfortable truth that most people don't want to hear: Without mindfulness, there can rarely be free will.
If you cannot observe yourself, your reactions, your patterns, your automatic scripts, you are not making choices. You are running scripts based on your past experiences.
I'm not saying this to be harsh. I'm saying it because I've lived it. I spent years believing I was making choices when I was just reacting to old wounds in new settings. I changed jobs, changed cities, changed relationships—and kept ending up in the same pain. That wasn't bad luck. That wasn't fate.
It was my unexamined life producing pathetically predictable outcomes.
The only thing that broke the loop was learning to sit still long enough to watch my own mind in action. Meditation is the practice that developed mindfulness in me. The skill of mindfulness gave me the opportunity to observe my scripted reactions. And that observation gave me an opportunity I never had before - To choose how I react.
Stop the copout
Fate is not a cosmic plan. Fate is what happens when you go with the flow, take the path of least resistance and never learn to observe yourself.
Free will is not the ability to do anything at any time. Free will is the ability to create a gap between stimulus & response—and then to recognize, in that gap, that I can choose a different script.
Mindfulness is how you build the skill to observe oneself.
Meditation is how I learned that skill but it's not the only way.
Whatever mindfulness method you use, a mindfulness practice allows you to practice building that observant pause when nothing is happening so that it's there when everything is.
That's it. That's the whole argument. No ambiguity. NO BS. Fate is a cop out. Grow up, put your big kid pants on and learn to observe how you react to things. It's the least we all can do, so the rest of the world doesn’t have to suffer through our ignorance of ourselves.
It's why I have one commandment and one commandment only.
KNOW THYSELF
Aristotle -”The unexamined life isn't worth living” I'll add “especially for those around you” because “ignorance is only bliss for the ignorant. It sucks for the rest of us.”
